where \(\text{EC}\) and \(\text{G}\) denote mentions of the Executive Council and the Governor in all available Massachussets newspapers, respectively.
Result 4: Coverage of Massachussets Executive Council
Original
Replication
Application: Measuring the power of state party committees
Prediction: State committees are no longer as powerful as they once were
Ban et al. (2019) uses newspaper coverage to measure the power of state committees relative to local committees
\[
\text{Relative Party Mentions}_{it} = \frac{\text{Party}_{it}}{\text{Party}_{it} + \text{Candidates}_{it}}
\]
Result 5: Party Committee Power in 9 U.S. States
Original
Replication
A Closer Look at the Replication Exercise
Differences from the original results
Able to replicate all of the main findings
Minor differences in standard errors reported in regression table 3B
Replication diagnosis
The authors could not provide access to the raw newspapers data since they are proprietary data.
They only provide cleaned, aggregated term counts across years, states, etc.
As such, I wasn’t able to replicate the crucial first half of the paper, i.e., pre-processing the text.
Replication diagnosis
The authors used Stata to pre-process the term counts to generate measures of interest and R to visualize the output
I convert all Stata codes to R, posted all codes and output images/tables on GitHub.
I find one minor error in their code:
... %>%mutate(# Generate relative proportionsrel_mayor_council_total = r_city_council + r_mayor,rel_mayor_council_control_total = r_control_sum_city_council + r_control_sum_mayor,rel_mayor_council = r_mayor / rel_mayor_council_total,rel_mayor_council_control = r_control_sum_mayor / rel_mayor_council_control_total, # In the original paper, r_mayor was used instead of r_mayor_xrel_mayor_council_total_x = r_city_council_x + r_mayor_x, rel_mayor_council_x = r_mayor_x / rel_mayor_council_total_x ) %>%...
Possible extensions
Possible extensions:
Application to the Indonesian case: rapid decentralization in 1998 shifts political power from central government to local government
Possible extension to other mediums, e.g., news broadcast?
Robustness checks to the DiD regression under new approaches by Callaway & Sant’Anna (2020), Chaisemartin & D’Haultfœuille (2020)
Limitations for extension:
Limited nuance of the power being measured
Limited use in developing country context due to pervasive power of “shadowy” political actors
Limited use of newspapers in modern context, and possible changes to the incentive structure of newspaper outlets